Re: pg_restore --no-post-data and --post-data-only

On Aug 24, 2011, at 7:43 PM, Josh Berkus wrote:
> On 8/23/11 1:30 PM, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
>>
>> Attached is an undocumented patch that allows pg_restore to omit
>> post-data items or omit all but post-data items. This has been discussed
>> before, and Simon sent in a patch back on 2008, which has bitrotted
>> some. I'm not sure why it was dropped at the time, but I think it's time
>> to do this. This patch relies on some infrastructure that was added
>> since Simon's patch, so it works a bit differently (and more simply).
>
> If it's not clear from Andrew's description, the purpose of this patch
> is to allow dividing your pgdump into 3 portions:
>
> 1. schema
> 2. data
> 3. constraints/indexes
>
> This allows users to implement a number of custom solutions for ad-hoc
> parallel dump, conditional loading, data munging and sampled databases.
> While doing so was possible before using the manifest from pg_restore
> -l, the manifest approach has been complex to automate and relies on
> obscure knowledge.
>
> I have immediate production use for this patch and may be backporting it.

FWIW, I got around this by writing a perl script that calls pg_dump -s and watches for the end of table create statements (IIRC it specifically looks for the first CREATE INDEX). The advantage to that approach is that you don't have to first create a custom format dump and then run pg_restore against that.
--
Jim C. Nasby, Database Architect jim(at)nasby(dot)net
512.569.9461 (cell) http://jim.nasby.net